Army Bringing Power to People in Iraqi Capital

Karima Jehry switched on the overhead light, turned on the ceiling fan and beamed with delight. After 20 days without power, her family’s electricity was restored Tuesday as part of a drive to reactivate the Iraqi capital’s electrical grid and begin restoring other essential services such as garbage collection.

“We are happy, so happy,” said Jehry, a mother of seven who lives in southern Baghdad. “Now our lives can be something like normal again. Until now, we felt that we were still living in a state of war.”

“No more of these!” said her 9-year-old daughter, Ansame, brandishing the kerosene lanterns the family had been using to light their home.

For the last several days, in a race against time and rising discontent among Iraqis, U.S. Army engineers have been working with Iraqi government technocrats to bring Baghdad’s broken utilities back to life. Their efforts are beginning to yield much-appreciated results.

On Sunday, after the American engineers celebrated Easter, they worked with their Iraqi counterparts for nine hours to provide electricity to about 100,000 homes in Baghdad. By Monday, about 8% of the city had power. By Tuesday afternoon, the figure was 25% and rising.

It is a colossal task, one the engineers say will get harder, not easier, because they have been tackling the simplest problems first. They expect it will take weeks before the city is rewired and functioning again. But the job is considered vital if the United States is to persuade Iraqis that their lives will be better after the fall of President Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials say Baghdad’s utility system was not targeted by American warplanes, and there was little direct damage to power or water plants. But power lines and other parts of the electrical grid were hit. The resulting power fluctuations burned out units of the capital’s three main power plants, which already had been degraded by years of sanctions. Units that were not damaged were shut down as a preventive measure.

Other services suffered similar outages. As a result, in the aftermath of the U.S.-led bombing campaign, Baghdad offers its nearly 5 million people few of the basic amenities of modern life.

With no electricity, there are no telephones and no television. Only a few stoplights work, with police and civilian volunteers directing the constant traffic. Fires, when they occur, burn unchecked, because nearly all of the city’s firetrucks were stolen. Banks are closed. People wait hours in line for a tank of gas. Hundreds of government buildings have been looted, making it impossible for bureaucrats to return to work -- even when they are willing to do so without pay.

“It is an incredible situation when you see a whole society in a state of total standstill,” said Roland Huguenin-Benjamin of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which this month issued a sharply worded call for the Americans, as the occupying force, to assume responsibility for establishing public health and safety services.

The man principally responsible for that duty, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who has been designated by the Pentagon as Iraq’s interim administrator, arrived in Baghdad on Monday to begin overseeing the country’s reconstruction. In the city of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, Garner on Tuesday praised the Kurds for how they have administered their region since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He said their actions could serve as a model for the country.

“We have together this small moment of time to begin a process of democratic government throughout Iraq that will take the wonders of Iraq and the wealth of Iraq and get it to the people,” Garner said in remarks at Sulaymaniyah University.

For now, progress in most of the country is slow.

Plants Are Firing Up

At the Doura electric plant in southeast Baghdad, one of the capital’s largest power plants, the noise of a giant turbine filled the air. One of four turbines in the sprawling complex, it was restarted Monday for the first time in nearly a month and was being tested Tuesday by engineers, who periodically shut it down as they detected problems.

In the control room, Iraqi shift supervisor Bassem Yehiyeh, clad in coveralls, watched a wall-sized panel of display monitors, lights and switches.

“Uh-oh, there’s a leak in one of the compressors,” he muttered.

Not far away from the Doura complex, at the Baghdad South plant, U.S. Army Maj. Clint Pendergast hurried over to Col. John Peabody.

“Good news, sir!” Pendergast shouted to be heard above the roar of freshly started turbines.

Electricity had begun flowing from the plant, bringing power back to parts of the city.

The American engineers were already buoyed by reports of celebratory gunfire Monday night from neighborhoods where power had been restored. Now, inside the decaying plant, they talked with Iraqi technicians to try to understand the country’s patchwork system of power generation and supply.

“Every day we peel off a new layer of the onion and find eight new things we didn’t know about how things work in this very complex area,” Peabody said.

The Iraqis have no blueprints, only crude wiring diagrams. American engineers puzzled over the diagrams Tuesday. The Iraqi engineers, most of them fluent English speakers, tried to help, but many don’t know the overall operation and are strangers to one another.

“Most of these guys never met each other before now,” said Maj. Andy Backus, an Army engineer.

The reason, the engineers explained, is that Hussein’s ruling Baath Party had set up a compartmentalized system in which officials at one plant knew nothing about how the next plant functioned -- apparently to keep the power system from being subverted.

“So instead of just linking A to B, we’ve had to go from A to C to F by way of G to get to B,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Steven Hawkins, commander of Task Force Fajr. Fajr means “dawn” in Arabic. The task force is a collection of engineers and civil affairs officers charged with helping Iraqis restore basic services.

“It’s not as simple as just flicking on a switch,” Hawkins said.

Even relaying orders to 30,000 unpaid electrical workers is a daunting task. And all of this must be accomplished without benefit of Iraq’s National Power Load Control Center, the computer brain that regulates the power load. It was destroyed by looters.

Backus said restoring power to Los Angeles after a massive blackout in 1996 was a major technical accomplishment. But restoring power to Baghdad -- “this city of 5 million, after a war, with a degraded infrastructure and stovepipe management structure” -- is a real challenge, he said.

The electrical system is limping along. For example, the Baghdad South plant, with a capacity of 315 megawatts, was struggling to produce 75 megawatts Tuesday as its aging General Electric turbines wheezed and groaned.

The typical daily prewar electricity demand in Baghdad in April is 1,000 to 1,400 megawatts, according to Iraqi officials. At the peak of summer, it reaches 2,600 megawatts. (The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, by comparison, serves about 3.7 million people, with peak summertime demand of about 5,500 megawatts.)

Electrical outages are not the only headache facing Baghdad’s utility managers. One of the most visible -- and pungent -- symbols of the capital’s state of disarray has been the piles of uncollected garbage on street corners and vacant lots.

Many of Baghdad’s garbage trucks were stolen in the wave of pillaging that swept the city with the government’s fall.

During the bombardment, city workers parked the trucks near mosques, hoping they would not be mistaken for military vehicles and targeted. In the last two weeks, Islamic groups have been using the trucks to voluntarily pick up garbage -- part of a campaign by Shiite community leaders to win public support and new political clout.

“We want people to respect us and to know that we can take care of them,” said Husam Adnan, one of the volunteer garbage truck drivers.

Other Services Affected

Like so many troubles here, one problem tends to lead to a plethora of others. The lack of electricity prevented water pumps from working, leaving many people with water service only a few hours a day -- or with taps that ran dry.

In some neighborhoods, people have been forced to drink untreated water, leading to outbreaks of disease.

“Before the bombardment, I would see perhaps 10 cases a week of waterborne diseases; now I see 100,” said Samir Zeid, who runs a small clinic in the desperately poor neighborhood of Aun al Maalaf. He gestured toward 3 1/2-year-old Jasim Mohammed, who was shaking with fever in his mother’s arms.

“Amoebic dysentery,” Zeid said. “And other little ones with diarrhea, they can die of it so easily.”

The U.S. Army engineers see progress in Baghdad as the first step in restoring hope to the country.

“This is the center of gravity,” said Peabody, the Army engineer. “Until we get Baghdad up and running, the rest of Iraq ain’t going to be up and running.”